How Sears helped subvert Jim Crow in the South
Retail giant and mail service helped Black Southerners survive the 20th century
ATLANTA— Sears’ declaration of bankruptcy this month was entirely expected, a train wreck long in the making.
What might have caught many by surprise were the immediate reflections by African-American scholars on the role that the retail giant — and its catalogue — played in helping Black Southerners survive the 20th century.
Upon the Sears announcement, Louis Hyman, an associate professor of history at Cornell University, began a string of notes on Twitter with this: “In my history of consumption class, I teach about #Sears, but what most people don’t know is just how radical the catalogue was in the era of #Jim Crow.”
“The catalog undid the power of the storekeeper, and by extension the landlord,” Hyman continued. “Black families could buy without asking permission. Without waiting. Without being watched. With national (cheap) prices!”
But the story of Sears is far more Southern than that, and stranger, too. It begins with Tom Watson, one of the most disreputable figures in Georgia political history. Until 2013, his statue graced the entrance to the state Capitol. It has since been given an out-of-theway spot in a garden across the street.
Watson was an author and journalist — a polemicist, really — who at the turn of the 20th century pressed successfully for the disenfranchisement of African Americans in Georgia. He is credited with rhetoric that helped spark the Atlanta race riot of 1906, which left a dozen Black citizens dead, and the 1915 lynching of Leo Frank.
None of those accomplishments are carved into the pedestal beneath his statue. But years before he turned bigot, Watson was an agrarian populist who built a following among Black and white farmers alike.
In 1892, he was elected to a single term in the U.S. House, and in those brief, two years accomplished one lasting thing that merited a notation on his pedestal: “Author of rural free delivery.”
RFD was the mind-bending, revolu- tionary notion that the U.S. post office should come to you, rather than require you to make daily or weekly trips to the faraway post office. Congressional approval was won in 1893. Sears, Roebuck and Co. started the next year. Its 322page illustrated catalogue was every bit as disruptive as Amazon.com is today.
Tom Watson would have been appalled by what he had wrought.
Rural free delivery and the Sears catalogue gave white farmers a direct commercial connection to the outside world. It gave Black Southerners that, too, and something more — anonymity in a society where access to the good things in life had heretofore been distributed according to skin colour.
“This gives African Americans in the South some degree of autonomy, some degree of secrecy,” said Sears historian Jerry Hancock, in a 2016 interview on Stuff You Missed in History Class, an Atlanta-based podcast. “Now they can buy the same thing everybody else can buy, and all they have to do is order it through this catalog. They don’t have to deal with racist merchants in town.”
The Sears connection was not without controversy. Bonfires of its catalogues were organized. According to Louis Hyman, the Cornell academic, white retailers in the South at one point spread a rumour that founder Richard Sears was Black — in an attempt to prompt a boycott.
But it wasn’t just a rumour spread by the white side of the South.
“We used to say Roebuck was Black, and that he had all the good ideas,” smiled Andrew Young, the former Atlanta mayor and UN ambassador. “It was the mythology of equality, that nothing happened that wasn’t black and white together.” (Both Sears and Alvah Roebuck, in fact, were white.)
As a boy, Young witnessed the power of direct mail. “My daddy had a dental trailer. He used to drive around Louisiana, fixing people’s teeth for free — under the Huey Long administration,” the former ambassador said. “Rural folk always had a Sears Roebuck catalogue.”
“But everybody had a Sears catalogue. We didn’t do a whole lot of shopping so much as dreaming,” Young said. “It created a vision of what was possible, that even when you were dirt poor, you could still dream.”